I wanna put an xml file content into a URL, can I?

Question

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"appName://<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>"];

But the url = nil. I found if I remove the "<" and ">" signs, it will be ok. So, the two signs cannot be used in a URL? Should I replace the signs with another one?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I solved this problem. Before I do NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"...."]; I first do:

    NSString *urlStr = [string stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

And when parse this url on the receiver side, I firstly do:

NSString *urlString = [[url absoluteString] stringByReplacingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; // url is a NSURL

Answer 2

Why would you not just POST the document in the body of the request?

GET requests are not designed for this. You may get into difficulty if there are UTF-8 chars in the document.

Also What is the maximum length of a URL in different browsers? implies a max of 2083 chars.

You're into a very browser/proxy dependent scenario.

Answer 3

Theoretically yes. You can use urlEncode to do this. The HTTP protocol does not place any limit on the length of the URL.

RFC says:

Note: Servers ought to be cautious about depending on URI lengths above 255 bytes, because some older client or proxy implementations might not properly support these lengths.